Personalized Customer Experiences
Healthcare
Full Contact Marketing Inside Episodes of Care
People today expect personalized shopping and service experiences across in-store, online and mobile touchpoints. They want to be presented with information that is relevant to their need, and that affirms that you remember them and their preferences.
Achieving that consistent, personalized service experience requires marketers to learn from every interaction with customers over multiple encounters. It is a task that is hard enough to do in industries that excel at the capture and recall of customer data. It is especially hard to do in health care where privacy rules and fragmented operating models make it difficult to capture customer data and difficult to put it to marketing use.
And, yet, there is perhaps no more important task for health care marketers than figuring out how to personalize the customer search for service and care experience. As prospective customers confront a multitude of provider options, all making competing claims of “best, most, newest, and most convenient,” engaging them at a relevant and deeply personal level becomes critical to winning their business and trust.
“People with this Diagnosis Also Scheduled…”
Health care offers great contrasts when it comes to care experiences. As an industry, we are in the midst of an incredible push to standardize around evidence based medicine (EBM) protocols. The goal is to eliminate clinical process variability as the means to deliver safe and more cost-effective care to patients.
But evidence based medicine need not mean one-size fits all service experiences. Marketers can and should be focused on presenting people with choices in where, when and from whom they receive their care, and giving patients custom content including recommendations to help inform those decisions. Those choices and custom content come from algorithms that look for correlations in customer use patterns. This is familiar stuff for people who use Amazon – “people who bought this book also bought these books.”The Amazon approach provides useful recommendations to guide shopping decisions based on the choices others have made in similar situations.
Think about the application of the same concept in health care.
Using a particular diagnosis as an anchor point, we can map out the sequence and pace of downstream service encounters for relatively large cohorts of patients. Those aggregated experiences can be used to predictively model what people with similar diagnoses will likely need and shop for over various time horizons. It can enable us to make recommendations and create patient experience maps in advance of the encounter to ensure we are ready to respond when the patient arrives at our door. The deeper that a patient goes into an episode of care, the more opportunities marketing and operations will have to further personalize the experience based on the patient’s choices and to make recommendations to shape the service encounter.
To succeed in this space, marketing must forge a tight working relationship with operations. This working relationship will allow the organization to most effectively capture for recall data on service experiences, and to hardwire moments into the experience where service recommendations can be made based on the patient’s unique journey across an episode of care.
BVK has pioneered the development of brands that connect with people on a deeply personal level by connecting to their core values. We are working with marketers to advance the art and science of translating customer knowledge and data into personalized customer experiences and relevant content at every point across episodes of care. Combining these two emerging disciplines of values-based brands and personalized customer experiences can create defensible competitive advantage. It can also transform how health care enterprises see marketing in ways that create multiple new opportunities to drive business growth.
To learn more about our approach, contact Mike Eaton at 757-784-1277 or [email protected] or Joel English at 414-247-3856, or [email protected]
